This June, Hum3D announced the winners of the Flying Cars 3D Competition 2022. Fox Renderfarm, as a world-leading render farm and cloud rendering services provider, also a long-term partner of Hum3D, sponsored this competition and witnessed the birth of many excellent and beautiful artworks. This time, we had the honor and opportunity to interview Ruming Cao. His work “Leave night” won first place in this competition.
Ruming Cao
1st Place of Hum3D Flying Cars 3D Competition 2022
V-Ray Certified Professional (VCP)
He has been engaged in realistic interior render for nearly ten years, specializing in high-precision modeling and photorealistic render. His works have been selected for many CG galleries such as 3dtotal, Evermotion, and VRAY WORLD.
Leave night © Ruming Cao
In his work “Leave night”, the car is not only a means of transportation for human beings, but also carries feelings. Father and mother divorced, children suffer the most. Father and child parted. He wants the robot butler to escort the children. Let the child arrive at the mother's house safely.
Fox Renderfarm: Hi Ruming, thanks for accepting our interview, could you please introduce yourself?
Ruming: Hi everyone, I’m Ruming Cao. I come from Ma'anshan, a small city in China, and now live in Hefei, China.
Fox Renderfarm: How many years have you been in the CG industry? Do you remember the first work you created? Please share with us.
Ruming: I started learning 3D software around 2013 or 2014, almost ten years ago.
My first CG work is a render of Interior design. My major in college is environmental art and design. One day, I saw my roommate doing interior design by chance, and I found it very interesting, so I started to try to create my first CG work. However, the work I did the first time was not good enough, not realistic enough. Now I can't find that picture.
© Ruming Cao
© Ruming Cao
Fox Renderfarm: Is there any artist who has inspired you the most?
Ruming: In the CG industry, I initially liked the works of two artists, Marek Denko and Jesus Selvera (Zuliban). In recent years, Blender is becoming more and more popular, so I have also paid attention to some artists who are good at Blender, such as Ian Hubert.
Her Eventual Hesitation © Marek Denko
Fox Renderfarm: We noticed that you started to participate in international CG competitions in the past two years. What was the opportunity for you to start participating in these competitions?
Ruming: The main reason is that I joined a CG industry group chat before, in which there are many great artists. One of them is Shangyu Wang (who won Second Place in Hum3D Flying Cars 3D Competition 2022). Although he is still a student, he is very passionate about CG and has superb skills. He often participates in many international competitions. Under his influence, I began to try to participate in this kind of competition, with the purpose of exchanging ideas and improving myself.
2nd Place of Hum3D Flying Cars 3D Competition 2022
Green screen © Shangyu Wang
Fox Renderfarm: How do you improve your aesthetic in art and CG skills in your daily practice?
Ruming: Regarding the way to improve my skills, in fact, I am the same as others, mainly by watching videos, like those technology-sharing videos on YouTube or Bilibili. Then, my improvement in art is mainly to practice painting. I usually like to draw sketches and color painting. During my school years, I practiced more and accumulated knowledge related to aesthetics. I suggest that you can learn to paint in your free time so that you can have a better understanding of the effect of light on objects and the relationship between colors.
Art is all interchangeable, and we can incorporate traditional paintings into our 3D works.
© Ruming Cao
© Ruming Cao
Fox Renderfarm: Congratulations on winning First Place in the Hum3D Flying Cars 3D Competition 2022 sponsored by Fox Renderfarm, how do you feel about it?
Ruming: Very happy. In fact, I had predicted that I could get First Place in this competition.
Leave night © Ruming Cao
Fox Renderfarm: Please introduce your award-winning work “Leave night” to us.
Ruming: I mainly used the following software to create this work, including: 3ds Max, Corona, Photoshop, Substance Painter, ZBrush and Marvelous Designer.
There are three main characters in this work: the little boy on the flying car and the robot butler, and the man wearing a mask under the car is his father.
Details of “Leave night” © Ruming Cao
Details of “Leave night” © Ruming Cao
The background of my work is the general social environment where the divorce rate is rising, resulting in more and more single-parent families. The image depicts a young boy saying goodbye to his father. The main color of the whole scene is cold, enhancing the sad atmosphere of separation. I thought this picture might touch some people. To fit the cyberpunk atmosphere, I made a robot next to the little boy, and let it act as a butler to escort the child away. This is the simple story about my work “Leave night”.
Details of “Leave night” © Ruming Cao
Fox Renderfarm: Where did you learn about this competition?
Ruming: I happened to see the competition on Facebook and entered with the intention of giving it a try.
Fox Renderfarm: Your work is rich in elements and complex in terms of scene settings, could you talk about your workflow? How do you make the whole 3D scene?
Ruming: I started by getting the overall composition defined, and drawing some drafts to sort out the character relationships. Then I started to create the surrounding environment. After the whole 3D environment was built, I began to make the main body - the car carefully. Finally, the characters were made.
© Ruming Cao
© Ruming Cao
© Ruming Cao
Fox Renderfarm: The jury complimented you on your use of color and lighting. Could you tell us more about how you set up the lighting and color?
Ruming: Regarding color, I mainly highlight the image by contrasting the ambient and artificial light. I use blue as the base tone for the overall atmosphere. As for artificial lighting, I add some lanterns and warm light to the interior of the car to make the color contrast. Therefore, the overall is a contrast between blue and orange.
Details of “Leave night” © Ruming Cao
Details of “Leave night” © Ruming Cao
Details of “Leave night” © Ruming Cao
Details of “Leave night” © Ruming Cao
Next, I will deal with the primary and secondary relationship of the screen. I darkened the foreground with some light blocking and added fog to the background. After adding the ambient fog, the visual contrast around the subject will become weaker, so that the visual center, which is the mid-ground part, can be more prominent.
Fox Renderfarm: Your work gives a unique sense of emotion. How do you set the mood?
Ruming: The mood of the work is actually nothing more than the good use of color matching and contrast in the image. I think we can learn more from the photographic works of other artists.
© Ruming Cao
For example, the contrast of some photography works is relatively strong, and the bright part may only account for one-third of the whole picture, which conveys more of a seclusion feeling. For another example, in terms of color, choosing warm colors as dominant hue can bring people a feeling of sunshine, while too many cold colors represent the feeling of gloom or loneliness. Ultimately, this is the impact of art on human vision.
© Ruming Cao
Fox Renderfarm: How long did you finish the work? What software and plugins did you use?
Ruming: It took about a month and a half. 90% of the models in this work are made by myself. Most of them, including modeling, mapping, materials are created by myself, and I can only use my free time to complete this work.
I use Marvelous Designer a lot, mainly to make backpacks and costumes for characters, as well as the wings on car. Also Substance Painter, a software for mapping, I use it to make most of the materials for car. I use ZBrush to sculpt the details of some objects, like the corners of rocks. I ended up using Photoshop for post-processing. Most of the others were made and rendered with 3ds Max and Corona.
© Ruming Cao
© Ruming Cao
© Ruming Cao
© Ruming Cao
© Ruming Cao
Fox Renderfarm: Did you meet any difficulties during your creation? How did you solve them?
Ruming: The only difficulty is the problem of scene optimization, because the amount of faces in the entire scene is very large, about 150 million, which is left after optimizing a large number of model agents.
During the later optimization, I found that there are some places where it is not necessary to do too much detail because it is invisible. For example, there are some screws on the pipes in the background. In fact, I made them, but it is invisible. I thought too much in the early stage, and it would be more troublesome to delete the number of faces or objects in the later stage. The only way I could make my computer better able to carry such a volume of models was by increasing its memory.
Details of “Leave night” © Ruming Cao
Fox Renderfarm: You also participated in the Evermotion Challenge 2021 sponsored by Fox Renderfarm and won Second Place. Can you briefly tell us about your winning entry?
Ruming: Evermotion Challenge 2021 was my first time participating in an international 3D creation competition. The main reason why I participated in it was also influenced by Shangyu Wang. I wanted to feel the atmosphere of the competition and practice my skills.
It took me about two weeks to create this work. I didn't expect to win Second Place at that time, but I felt very happy after winning the prize, after all, there are bonuses.
My work was titled "As busy as a robot". I was so busy during that time that I didn't really pay much attention to it. I only spent some spare time every day to create it. The idea was that I was so busy and looked like a robot. So when I was making it, I incorporated the robot at work in the forest scene. And the surrounding environment is also what I yearn for. I hope I can go hiking or travel in my spare time, so I created the feeling of deep forest in the surrounding area.
As busy as a robot © Ruming Cao
Fox Renderfarm: What do you think of the cloud rendering service of Fox Renderfarm? Please feel free to make suggestions to us.
Ruming: The biggest advantage I think is that the rendering is really fast. It helps me to finish my work efficiently, and it greatly reduces my rendering burden, because my computer is not as good as enough. So with a render farm like this, I can work more efficiently. Thank you very much.
Fox Renderfarm: Is there anything you would like to say to newcomers who want to enter the CG industry?
Ruming: In fact, the industry technology of the renderers, including software rendering, is quite perfect now. Unlike many years ago, if you want to create a realistic image, you may have to work very hard at that time.
Nowadays, more and more artworks can be rendered photorealistic or even cinematic. The more advanced the technology, the more attention should be shifted from the software to the art creation or the storytelling of images. It is from these perspectives that we can impress others more. Therefore, I think to enter the CG industry, the main thing is to develop better imagination and artistic aesthetics. Now the software and skill are not too big problems.
